COVID-19: The Great Equalizer

By now, the human species has been altering the natural order for some 11000 years. It started with the advent of agriculture and went through urbanization and industrialization which transformed the surface of the earth and began changing a host of natural systems including the climate, animal life, forests and oceans. We humans have known about this for a while. But most of us – especially those of us in the advanced economies and not living too close to the rising waters – could see the impact of our disruption of natural systems as something that would affect other people – future generations, the poor, those living in low-lying island nations – and not so much us in the here and now. COVID-19 has altered that by bringing to all of us the results of our changes to the earth. It has equalized the impact of the destruction of natural environments (which stresses what lives in them thereby making them more prone to diseases that can jump to us), the way we use animals (including how close we live with them and the antibiotics we use to fatten them) and the close quarters (in large numbers) in which we live. Add to this the way we use hydrocarbons to travel and transport, the interconnectedness of our ways of life and economies and the varying shortcomings of our political systems. We should not have been surprised by the current bio-crisis. It’s not that any one of these caused the virus but that the total impact of what we have wrought was largely hidden until now though very much operative.

So COVID-19 shows us that the bill won’t wait to be delivered and that everyone must pay. The rich may be able to retreat to their enclaves and private transport. But their world will change as ours does. The species as a whole will survive. But this is the wake up call. The future disrupted world is upon us now. Returning to “normal” – whenever and whatever that turns out to be – may well be just a breather before the next episode. We need to take the next step in our evolution – remake our economies and politics, restoring nature even if gradually and treating each other more equally – and start now or the humanity that makes it to the 22^nd Century may be unrecognizable.

Continuing Notes on Sabine's "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 33

For episode 32, see here

The Theory of the Nation-State: The Moderns 

XXXIII. Fascism and National Socialism
 A. Somehow national socialism and fascism were combination of
     professed socialists and professed nationalists.
 B. Attempt to marshal total energies of people behind government
     led to emphasis on war (or preparation for war, even permanent
     preparation for war).
 C. Mussolini and Hitler mined the ideas of philosophic irrationalism.
       1. Combined, on an emotional level, cult of the folk and cult
           of the hero.
       2. Schopenhauer saw behind nature and human life the
           struggle of a blind force within the human mind -- 'will' --
           to construct an illusion of order and reason.  The hope for
           mankind was to end this struggle through contemplation,
           consciousness without desire.
       3. Nietzsche moralized struggle in place of achievement. Values
           based on superior capabilities would replace liberal values. 
       4. Bergson gave utilitarian value to intellect and saw it as the
           servant of the 'life force' (similar to 'will').
       5. Sorel substituted 'life-force' for materialism thus stripping
           Marxism of its economic determinism.  Class struggle is
           the manifestation of sheer creative violence on the part of
           the proletariat. Myths inspire such movements; philosophy is
           social myth.
 D. Hegel was a rationalist and did not see philosophy as myth.
       1. But Mussolini used Gentile's Hegelianism (theory of the
           state) because it was expedient.
       2. Claims were merely in pseudo-Hegelian language where
           'might is right' and 'liberty' is found in subjection. 
 E. Central terms of national socialism:
       1. Folk (race) -- organic people.
       2. The Elite and the Leader.
       3. Lebensraum -- the territorial expansion of a Germanic
           empire.
       4. The Folk:
           i. the individual emerges from the Folk tom which he owes all
           ii. individuals are not equal as they embody the reality of the
              Folk in varying degrees
           iii. at the center is the Leader
       5. Society is:
           i. the Leader -- charismatic 'natural" hero of the folk
           ii. the ruling elite -- provides intelligence and direction
           iii. the masses -- not capable of heroism, inert and led 
               by emotions


Note:  This ends my notes from Sabine's A History of Political Theory. These entries start here. I have tried to be truthful to what I recorded as I read Sabine many years ago but have tweaked them here and there.  I have regained an understanding of Western political thought and its continuing relevance.  I hope they might help do the same for whoever stumbles upon them. 
  


 
 
 
           

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 26

For episode 25, see here

The Theory of the Nation State: The Moderns

XXVI. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Rediscovery of Community
 A. Great gap between Rousseau and his contemporaries.
 B. Was a deeply divided personality, noble vs base, ideal vs real.

     "More than most men, Rousseau projected the contradictions and maladjustments of his own nature upon the society about him and sought an anodyne for his own painful sensitivity. (Sabine, 577)"

 C. Used contrast between the natural and the actual not as appeal to reason 
      but to attack reason.
 D. Against intelligence, growth of knowledge and Enlightenment progress,
      he set amiable and benevolent sentiments, good will and reverence.

     "What gives value to life is the common emotions, perhaps one may say instincts, in respect to which men differ hardly at all and which he imagined to exist in a purer and less perverted form in the simple uneducated man than in the enlightened and sophisticated."

 E. Based his values on "realities" of everyday life.
 F. Intelligence and science are dangerous because they undermine 
     reverence and faith.
 G. Pulled philosophy away from union with science and implanted 
      distrust of intelligence.
 H. Rejected systematic individualism and self-interest as virtue.
 I.  Took from Plato a general outlook.
       1. Political subjection is essentially ethical and only secondarily a
           matter of law and power.
       2. Community itself is chief moralizing agent and represents the
           highest moral value.
       3. Therefore fundamental moral category is citizen not man.
 J. Saw rights not as against community but within it.
       1. Natural egoist is fiction, some kind of community is inevitable,
           society is purely instinctive.
       2. Community has corporate personality, a general will.
       3. Government is agent for this will (could be radical or conservative).
       4. General will is the source of law and morals.
 K. The General Will
       1. Saw city-state as the best example of venue for the general will.
       2. Contract useful device even though government has no
           independent power; citizens exist as members of society,
           individuals have no rights except as members of the community.
       3. General will is the collective good of the community which is not
           the same as the private interest of its members.
       4. Men become equal within a society not because (per Hobbes)
           their physical power is substantially equal.
       5. Absolute authority of general will vis-a-vis indefeasible individual
           rights.
       6. When one is forced to obey general will, one is being forced to
           be free because one doesn't know his own good.
 L. Rousseau originated romantic cult of the group contrary to rationalist's
      cult of the individual.  
 M. In adapting the model of citizenship within the city-state to modern
      modern nation-state, Rousseau helped to recast it in such a form
      that national sentiment could appropriate it.
 N. Rousseau's impact
       1. Idealizing moral feeling of the common man led to Kant
       2. Full significance of idealizing collective will and participation in the
           common led to the idealism of Hegel.
       3. Descartes split reason from custom, Rousseau tacitly set it aside,
           Hegel tried to reunite them.
       4. Burke supplied missing content to "general will" by giving
           corporate life of England (custom and tradition) a conscious reality.

Next week:  Convention and Tradition -- Hume and Burke










 
 


 
 




 

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 21

For episode 20, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XXI. Thomas Hobbes
 A. Hobbes' political writings occasioned by civil war and were intended to
      support the King. 
 B. Sought to account on scientific grounds for all facts of nature including
      society and individuals (an approach now defined as materialism).
       1. Derived complex appearances from underlying simple motions.
       2. Used a geometry and physics to account for individual physiology
           and psychology and those to build a philosophy of the most complex
           "artificial" bodies, society and the state.
 C. That which was natural for Hobbes was not an end (e.g. natural law) but a
      cause (the psychological mechanism of the human animal).
       1. Resulting in societies made up of mutual actions and reactions of
           individuals upon each other.
       2. Not moral ideals but causes that will evoke generally cooperative
           behavior are conditions of a stable union.
 D. All emotions and desires derive from primitive attractions or retractions
      from stimulus.
 E. Rule behind all behavior is that a living body is set instinctively to preserve
      or heighten its vitality.
       1. Leads to restless pursuit of means to continue existence.
       2. Means that security is always precarious with result that there is no
           limit on the desire for security and power ("the present means of
           obtaining apparent future goods").
       3. This plus a rough equality in capabilities leads to a war of all against
           all -- with no "right" or "wrong" -- and thus making civilization
           impossible. 
 F. Reason is second principle of human nature.
       1. Makes pursuit of security more effective.
       2. Ruthless pursuit of individual advantage cannot be basis of society.
       3. Calculating selfishness brings man into society.
 G. Laws of nature state what ideally rational beings would do to achieve
      security. 
       1. This forms postulates upon which rational construction of society
           takes place.
       2. Laws amount to this:
           i. peace and economy have greater utility for self-preservation than
              violence and general competition
           ii. peace requires mutual confidence in the surrender of the "right to
               everything"
 H. Society is simply the means to an end.
       1. Based on utilitarianism and individualism.
       2. Such a notion of individualism was a clean break with customary 
           ideas about economic and social institutions.
       3. The defense of monarchy superficial next to this.
 I. To safeguard covenant by which all surrendered rights, a coercive
     power, i.e. government, was required. 
       1. Men do what they dislike on pain of suffering what they dislike even
           more.
       2. Cooperation is formed by union of individuals -- not consent from
           "citizens" -- which acts as, and through, one sovereign individual. 
 J. Law and morals are the same, simply the will of the sovereign.
 K. All necessary powers belong to the sovereign and are individual and 
      unalienable. 
       1. There is no justification for resistance.
       2. Yet if resistance is successful and the sovereign unable to govern
           (provide security), he is sovereign no longer.
       3. Monarchy not essential to the theory.
       4. Church is the only other corporation existing as an act of sovereign will.
 L. Advantages  of government are tangible and must accrue to individuals.
 M. Rests on no general or public good or will, only self-interested individuals. 

Next week: Radicals and Communists

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 19

For episode 18, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XIX The Modernized Theory of Natural Law
 A. Political philosophy released from association with theology in early 17th
      Century.
       1. Possible because gradual recession of religious conflict,
       2. Gradual secularization of issues of political theory,
       3. Secularization of intellectual interests bought on by the spread of
           scholarship to antiquity,
       4. Progress in mathematics and physical sciences.
 B. Althusius -- Calvinist, anti-royalist
       1. Separated jurisprudence and politics in reaction to Bodin
       2. Based natural society on contract
           i. contract explained relations between ruler and ruled (contract of
            government)
           ii. also explained existence of any group whatever (social contract)
       3. State is built up from series of contracts of lesser social groups 
           down to the individual level
       4. Sovereignty resided in the people as corporate body and could not
           be alien to it
       5. Government holds power for the sovereign
 C. Grotius -- Natural Law
       1. On the state, less clear than Althusius
       2. Importance was on conception of law regulating relations between
           states
       3. Sought to base common (natural) law in pre-Christian thought
       4. Argued against view of natural justice as motivated by
           self-interest and therefore merely a social convention
           i. appeal to utility is ambiguous since man is inherently social
           ii. maintenance of society is a major utility
           iii. peaceful social order is intrinsic good and conditions required
             for it just as binding as those which serve private ends
           iv. certain conditions or values must obtain if society is to persist
             and are thus necessary to man's nature
           v. these natural conditions are the basis of positive law of states
           vi. natural law no more arbitrary than arithmetic
       5. His attempt to rigorously ground reason part of move toward 
           "demonstrative" systems of philosophy
       6. Natural law seen as basis for social and philosophical geometries

Descartes' method (427): "resolve every problem into its simplest elements; proceed by the smallest steps so that each advance may be apparent and compelling; take nothing for granted that is not perfectly clear and distinct."

 D. Natural Law was introduction of normative element into law and politics.
 E. Contained possible ambiguities not immediately apparent.
       1. Differences between factual truth and logical implication
       2. Ambiguity between logical and moral necessity
       3. Critical analysis of these awaited Hume
 F. Unity of system based on some general agreement on what was
       important to insist on:
       1. Obligation to consent
           i. meant there were two parts to political theory -- contract and state
             of nature
           ii. this implied two contract, one as basis of the community and one 
             between the community and governing officials
       2. Human well-being required enlightened intelligence
       3. Middle class notion of individual human nature
       4. Society seen as mode for man not the other way around
       5. Relations in society less real than the individuals in themselves

Next week:  England: Preparation for Civil War
             


 

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 15

For episode 14 see here

The Theory of the National State

XV. Machiavelli
 A. Medieval representative system suffered eclipse
       1. Growth of national unity  
       2. Growth of royal absolutism
       3. Corresponding changes in political thought
       4. Extended trade broke through localized economies:
          i. led to formation of class of men of wealth and enterprise
          ii. and allied with king against nobility
 B. Italy of Machiavelli (early 16th century) divided and weak
 C. Naked individualism of Italian republics' political life presaged modern age
      of individualism
 D. Writing in diplomatic tradition, Machiavelli lost sight of ends, seeing method
      (politics) as its own end*
 E. Saw two standards of morals
       1. Ruler -- judged by success in keeping and increasing power
       2. Private citizen -- judged by strength which his conduct imparts to the
          social group
 F. Assumed human nature is essentially selfish
       1. Meant desire for security on part of the masses...
       2. ... and desire for power in rulers
 G. Also saw man as aggressive and acquisitive; that there are limited resources
       leads to:
       1. condition of continued conflict, restrained by ...
       2. ... for of law, leading to ...
       3. ... the power of the ruler who provides security.
       4. became the political philosophy of Hobbes 
 H. Lawgiver constructs not only political life but also social
 I.   In society of egoists, only force behind law could hold society together
 J.  Favored popular, liberal and lawful government when possible, monarchy
       when necessary
 K. Was an Italian nationalist  

* Note:  Sabine gets Machiavelli not so much wrong as incomplete.  He did not loss sight of ends --  seeing only method -- but rather sought to bring The Prince to see that the best way to maintain power was to act with prudence (and at least appear to be moral) even when using force.  (The Prince was in effect a job application.)  In The Discourses, Machiavelli essentially encourages the rulers towards a Republic based on law as the best way to ensure stability.
 
Next week:  The Early Protestant Reformers

Dinosaurs and Intelligence

Dinosaurs arose some 240 million years ago. They became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates after the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event 201 million years ago. Their ascendancy lasted another 135 million years until the Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago opened the world to the eventual rise of mammals and us. The first mammal-like forms appeared some 225 million years ago. But for the next 160 million years, mammals had to find their niches in the shadow of the dinosaurs, characteristically living a nocturnal lifestyle, emerging from burrows to feed only at night. This may have favored the evolution of better eye-sight, smell, touch and hearing to be able to navigate, find food and survive in the dark. But they still had to hide from the dinosaurs.

The question of why dinosaurs never developed cognitive intelligence, despite the many millions of years they were the top vertebrate clade, forms a rich WWW vein. (Search for the question and check it out.) Some dinosaurs did get quite intelligent in the form of birds. Some avian dinosaurs are even tool users. But there is no evidence that dinosaurs ever achieved anything like the human intelligence which has allowed us to alter our environment in ways both planned and unplanned. We human beings (the last surviving species of the homo genus) have been around for only some 200 thousand years. If one starts counting with the Australopithecus, then our progenitors go back around 3.6 million years. In either case, the fact that dinosaurs didn’t develop intelligence and complex technology even over a hundred million years while we did in just a few raises at least two questions: Is the rise of intelligence inevitable and does it have survival value over the long run?

The second question may be easier to answer. Dinosaurs and all other life on earth have done pretty well without human-style intelligence. Indeed, intelligence has not played a major role over the four billion years of life on earth. Some dinosaurs may have been clever hunters, as are wolves for example, and Jurassic Park has shown us a possible example. But they apparently found the use of claw, teeth, armor and size sufficient to last until a huge asteroid took them out with most other life. This leads to an answer to the first question, was the rise of intelligence inevitable. We can never know what might have happened with the clever dinosaurs if they were given the next 65 million years instead of mammals. Large brains need extra oxygen and are costly in energy. Maybe there would never have been any evolutionary advantage to making the investment. Human intelligence may be a cosmic accident, the result of a particular rock hitting at a particular moment allowing the burrowing underclass – mammals – to take their furtive ways into the sunlight.

So to return to the question of the long-term survival value of our big brains, the dinosaurs did really well without them and it is not clear that they will save us from ourselves.

The Senior Citizen Event Horizon

A friend at work today mentioned a news report he saw about some driver-less car going up a mountainous road with no guard rail and with passengers on board but with no one actually driving. This comes as part of a blitz of developments in smart cars and appliances, bots, the Internet of Things, wireless everywhere and Artificial Intelligence. I recently bought a smart TV mostly because I finally wanted HighDef. The TV is a 2015 model so not so smart. As far as I am concerned, this is a good thing. With OPM, the DNC, banks and businesses, etcetera, falling victim to an alarming array of professional and military hackers, I really am comfortable with all the inanimate devices I use being dumb and unconnected. I've come to realize that the ever-increasing wave of technological change has swept by me and that's okay. I'm comfortable in the world of pre-2016 things. I really don't need to live in the world of future tech. It's beyond my event horizon. I don't mind doing my own shopping list and don't see myself buying a fridge that will do it for me. My washer and dryer have settings I can set. The house thermostat responds directly to my pressing its buttons. My car does allow hand-free calls and hooks my music through Bluetooth from my iPhone. But I like driving it myself. (I even have stick.)

Those who have grown up after the time when users could write his/her own programs – I used Basic to do a recipe program on my Commodore 64 – and even more those now getting iPads in school will feel quite comfortable traveling through a world best captured in the sci-fi series of The Golden Age. Hopefully, it won't all collapse into a singularity.

The World in the 21st Century: Facing a Singularity

It seems possible to discern four major trends that will determine the future of humanity in the 21^st Century. They suggest a world approaching a multifaceted singularity that will mark an unprecedented change in everything and characterized most fundamentally by a loss of even the gloss of human agency.

The Economist of March 14 (2015) covers one of these trends in suggesting the likely continued success of “Factory Asia” – China plus its manufacturing chain of the currently even lower wage countries of Southeast Asia. This already accounts for almost half of all manufactured goods produced on the planet. China's advantages – financial and technological plus low cost labor and the very large domestic market – will allow it to continue to dominate manufacturing. But the real story here is that – as The Economist points out – this dominance will make it very difficult for other developing countries to progress to growth and prosperity through making things. The paper suggests services and agriculture as alternatives. But the basic problem is deeper and has been visible for much longer: looking at it globally, there may not be enough work to do to supply meaningful paid jobs to everyone who needs or wants one.

This highlights the second trend – the rising tide of computer-driven automation and the subject of “How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over” by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of April 2 (2015). In reviewing a book by Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us), Halpern notes that while predictions that mechanization would put humans out of work – and even Keynes saw the problem of what he called “technological unemployment” – so far technological advance has seemed to create new jobs to replace lost ones. But Carr argues that we are facing something new this time as computer driven automation – robots and virtual robots – takes on tasks such as surgery, drug development, driving, analysis and writing software and not only old fashioned machine production. This means not only losing jobs but most especially good jobs. While increased efficiency and lower cost of the goods and services produced through this new age of automation may be good for consumers with money, the questions arise of who will be able to afford them and what quality of life will those with no or unrewarding work have? As Paul Krugman has noted, most benefit – in the form of higher profits – will accrue to those few who own the robots.

So “modernity” in the 21^st Century may turn out to equal a shrinking middle class and increased and unrelenting inequality. This leads to the third trend, the breakdown of order. Over the last few centuries, an increasing number of people have experienced modernity as disruption to their lives and traditions and an increasingly fierce struggle for livelihood. The frustration, resentment and often unbridled competition produced provided the motive force to the social and political movements that led to the domestic and international conflicts and wars of the 20^th Century. The Cold War contained these forces by dividing the world between just two all-powerful and demanding camps. But since the fall of the USSR, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and reassertion of nationalisms, new forces of disorder have added to the old while the world has splintered into multipolar chaos. Globalization has meanwhile not solved inequality but has succeeded in presenting have-nots with minute-by-minute images of what they have not. The Cold War may have been an artificial order while disorder and chaos may be the new rule in what might be best described as an ever encroaching “state of nature.” And by the way, “military responses” just seem to make things worse and the rich don't seem to see a problem.

This brings us to environmental change, where the environment might be best understood as including the natural world in its totality: biology (e.g., disease) and land (e.g., desertification) as well as weather and climate. Scientists tell us – and have been telling us for a while – that humans are changing the world in ways we can't entirely predict but seem to be leading to challenges unprecedented in human evolution.

So, we – and more to the point, our children and their children – face finding a way to live in a world increasingly characterized by inequality, disorder and automated change that seems to be racing beyond our control. A singularity is something you enter that leads into a reality beyond normal experience. If we have not yet passed the event horizon of this human “black hole,” we are close. Time to start thinking of something different?

Why Aren't We Hearing Anyone Else?

Read an article recently on the Great Filter, the notion that we may not come across any evidence of advanced civilizations beyond our own because something eventually rubs them out.  We have been sending out electro-magnetic signals for over a hundred years and have been listening for almost as long.  We have by now discovered almost 1800 exoplanets. An estimated 22% of sun-like stars in our galaxy may have earth-like planets orbiting in their habitable zones.  That would mean 20 billion candidates for life such as ours. Four of such earth-like exoplanets planets have been identified within 50 light years of us, another two within 500 LYs.

There is no reason to assume that life would have to be similar to our carbon-based form or would require conditions similar to ours.  Life on our planet sprung up quickly and the physics and chemistry of our universe seem to favor self-organizing processes.  Life forms could be quite varied and perhaps universal.

Enrico Fermi suggested in 1950 that if any advanced civilization developed the ability to travel beyond its solar system, even at less than light speed, in ten million years it should be able to colonize the whole Milky Way (100,000 LYs in diameter).  So why don't we see them?  Why haven't we even heard anyone else?  The Great Filter suggests various possibilities.

The first would be that advanced life is rare.  The conditions for it to develop are quite special. While life on earth arose quickly, in just 400 million years after earth formed a solid crust, it took another almost two billion years for complex single cells to evolve.  Add another billion years – about 550 million years ago – for multi-cellular creatures.  Most of the history of life on earth is this long prelude to the development of us.  Humans arose only in the last two million years of the earth's 4,500 million years.  Along the way, life went through several mass extinction events.  The last one, 65 million years ago, took out the dinosaurs leaving the ground clear for the development of mammals.  The combination of events and circumstances that led to us may be so rare as to make us one of the very few – or only – lucky ones.

But with some probable 20 billion earth-like exoplanets and some 100 billion likely planets in all, chances are that however rare, odds would favor the development of a considerable number of advanced life forms in our galaxy.  Some might have arose millions of years ago.  Any signals they sent would have had plenty of time to reach us.  Any earth-like planet with advanced life within 500 LYs would presumably have been heard by now.  So far, the SETI project has found none.

Perhaps our listening capabilities are still not sensitive enough to pick up any signals.  But clearly we are now able to tease out the existence of exoplanets themselves out some two thousand light years.

Maybe cosmic natural disasters – nearby super-novas, meteor strikes, etc – occur frequently enough to set back life and knock out civilizations before they can get very far?  But we've gone 65 million years without one and there is no reason to expect any such for at least the next few hundred years.

Maybe someone is out there, able to hide themselves and/or tracking down and destroying any potential competitors before they get too far?  This is a common science fiction trope.   But it assumes that advanced civilizations would either be very modest – and thus hide themselves, perhaps quietly visiting and making crop circles or waiting for us to rise to the level where we could join their Federation – or especially vicious and aggressive.  Based upon the only advanced civilization we know of – ourselves – one could not rule out the second possibility.

Finally, there is the possibility that there is something about advanced technologies that operates to cut short the civilization that develops them: industrial civilization leading to run-away climate change; biotechnology leading to – or failing to keep up with – disruptions in the present web of life; failure of critical management systems to handle increasingly complex and changing political, social, economic and ecological dynamics.

Bottom line, so far we have no evidence that we have company anywhere out there. We may be special. Question is, are we doomed to be filtered out and will we have ourselves to blame?